


Circle of Fifths

by quenne



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Backstory, Classical Music, Gen, Music, Musicians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-11
Updated: 2010-11-11
Packaged: 2017-10-13 04:18:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/132748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quenne/pseuds/quenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meredith runs straight to the piano after school. Some days he'll go to the library to check out books for study, but most of the time he runs straight home and starts to practice first thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circle of Fifths

_C Major_

Meredith runs straight to the piano after school. Some days he'll go to the library to check out books for study, but most of the time he runs straight home and starts to practice first thing.

Scales, three octaves, major, pure minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor, then in thirds. Arpeggios, full range, no pedal.

He can hear the screen door squeak open and slam shut into its frame, a metallic crash that tells him mom is going outside to smoke, trying to avoid his warm-ups. She hates the monotony of scales and finger exercises, but Meredith knows he has to practice them. He knows why and he never skips them, even when he hears his mom sigh loudly as she leaves the house.

Anyway, he likes the structure of scales and arpeggios, the inherent building blocks of the music he loves to play. He can feel the way they twine around each other, in octaves then in thirds, the comforting sound of a framework wrapped in routine.

The exercises are different. They're boring because it's just the same pattern played over and over again in different keys. They were interesting at first, when he was practically a baby, before he could understand that the way the key they were played in colored the music. Still, he plows through the exercises dutifully, making sure his hand and finger position are exactly correct.

 _G Pure Minor_

He's good at school, too, especially math and science, if he applies himself. He does; his mother doesn't let him practice if he has homework, so he's careful to finish it all at school so he can come home with no books (except the music theory and chemistry ones from the library).

He's not so good at making friends. The other kids are stupid anyway – they just want to play games and waste their time on nothing, chasing balls around or pulling girls' pigtails. He hates them and they hate him. He comes home right after school because he's a scrawny kid and being small and smart is a recipe for being a punching bag for the bullies. He'll show them when he's playing Carnegie Hall before he's eighteen. He's going to be a virtuoso. All he has to do is keep practicing and he'll get there.

 _Ab Major_

His mother likes the Chopin, so he always finishes his warm-up with an étude. He knows her favorites by heart, and he waits to hear her come back into the house, signaled by the creak of the screen door, before he starts them.

Sometimes she will watch him play, and he can feel her smile all the way across the room. It makes the music clearer, the chords building architecture, a house for him and his mom to play in together.

She always applauds when he finishes his Chopin. He knows it's because he's her son, that she would clap even if he missed every single note and no idea who Chopin was, but he can hear the roaring crowd in it anyway. He'll make her proud, playing on the world stage with all her favorite orchestras. She likes Montréal and Philadelphia and Concertgebouw. He like Berlin and Chicago and London. He's going to play them all, someday.

 _B Melodic Minor_

His father's contribution to Meredith's career is to find him a teacher, someone worthy of the prodigious talent of his son. He drags Meredith to one failed performer after the next, giving them one lesson to prove they have something to teach that Meredith doesn't already know.

He's taught himself almost everything; his very first teacher explained why things worked the way they did, the basic idea of how to do scales and arpeggios and finger exercises, why he should practice études and what composers were good for little hands. She lasted for three months before she had nothing more to give him.

He'd pocketed the piano lesson money after that, buying his own books and working out his own repertoire. He didn't like Mozart that much, but she had been right about little hands. He can't do Brahms or Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky yet. But he'll be ready when he can.

 _D# Harmonic Minor_

His father settles on Mr. Wolff, a giant of a man who whacks a ruler against the piano to make sure Meredith is playing in time. Meredith hates playing with a metronome, but he hates that ruler more, so he starts to play with a metronome clicking along all the time during practice.

His mother doesn't come back inside when he plays Chopin any more.

 _G# Pure Minor_

After two months of playing with the metronome constantly, the ruler-snapping desists. Mr. Wolff complains about Meredith's musicality, now, but Meredith doesn't understand what he means; he talks about leaves falling on the wind and dancing angels and other nonsense.

Meredith keeps practicing his scales and his exercises and his etudes, but they don't shine the way they used to. The books he brings home from the library are more and more about chemistry and physics and less and less about music. Carnegie Hall slips into his dreams, and in a few years, when his teacher will tell him he hasn't the soul to be a concert pianist, it will be a relief.

**Author's Note:**

> For the LJ community Stargate_LAS. The prompt was [character] at age 10. I picked Rodney because the music bug hit.


End file.
